Herein, related art may be discussed to put the invention in context. Related art labeled “prior art” is admitted prior art; related art not labeled “prior art” is not admitted prior art.
Centralized management of remote computers requires local access to configuration and utilization data for the remote computers. If required information is gathered from remote computers only upon request, there can be an undesirable latency between the request and provision of the data. This problem can be ameliorated by caching recently used data so that, if it is requested again, it can be supplied from a local cache. In an alternative approach, a management function continuously polls all remotely managed computers so that all data relating to their management is available locally. However, this approach can result in superfluous accesses and consume network bandwidth. The present invention provides for management of remote computers with fewer remote accesses so that network bandwidth is used more efficiently. These and other features of the present invention are apparent from the description below with reference to the following drawings.